On the race issue, what a cop out to NOT acknowledge the cultural milieu of the past that led to policies many now deem to be embarrassing, erroneous, and in need of apology. Why not admit to the same fallibility that upholders of slavery and the divine right of husbands to mistreat and deny the personhood of their wives have had to do as times, ideologies, and laws changed. Stop hiding behind divine revelation to explain while not apologizing! But I digress…

Here’s a link people who are interested in priesthood politics and women might find interesting: https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/pdf/029-16-25.pdf (I hope that works. if not, google Lavina Anderson, “A Gift Given, a Gift Taken: Washing, Anointing, and Blessing the Sick Among Mormon Women” in a journal called SUNSTONE.) This article explains that 19th c. Mormon women had and used certain priesthood rights now denied to them, as well as LONG denied to but now possessed by men of color.

It has long been of great interest to me why women would have endured what they did to cross the plains, often leaving behind cherished family and possessions, risking ridicule and persecution, as well as life and limb, to suffer the pains of isolation, hostility, pestilence, and all manner of difficulities…all so they could endure polygamous marriages, which NO women liked, and which caused some women to side-step their place and openly criticize this particularly egregious aspect of female oppression. What must have been different back then to have made the women’s faith and commitment (or desperation?) so strong that they wouldn’t have revolted? I could never accept that the hierarchy that elevated their pre-pubescent son’s righteousness above that of their mothers, along with all the other trappings of male privilege, would have attracted many female “saints.” It turns out, interestingly, that early Mormon women did in fact have more rights than modern Mormon women do, or realize they do. However, it should probably be noted that they never held the full entitlements of priesthood, only the power to bless and heal the sick. Still, why women lost that “gift” is interesting.

Today’s Mormon women’s domestic work is still not acknowledged as such. Oh how many times I witnessed the Mormon mothers of friends/bfs up before 4a.m. to press the church clothes of their MANY children and husband while simultaneously prepping breakfast and dinner for an army, all before everyone else would rise on their so-called day of rest. I also remember hearing the husbands of such women bemoaning the shameful practice of mowing lawns or working in gas stations on “the sabbath.” So far as I saw things, everyone in the family got their day of rest BECAUSE of the extra invisible work performed by the wife/mother, who didn’t even have the power to bless herself if she cut her finger while paring ten pounds of potatoes that would later comprise the traditional favorite Mormon side dish, “funeral potatoes.”

Perhaps someday I will write a feminist analysis of Mormon womanhood…once I have established myself as some other type of scholar first. There’s some very good stuff there, and the church is eventually, I believe, going to have to change its policies on women’s low position in the family/cultural hierarchy if it is to continue to grow. At least, that is my hope.

What I am not interested in are the internal complexities of those delusions themselves, such as the specific tailoring required for the underwear to be appropriately magical or whether the wooden boxes need to have some special shit inside them or how the converting-the-dead-to-mormons process is complete hinges on whether the dead person has signed some cockamamie document.

I still find the significant investment of time and energy in somebody else’s salvation inspiring in some ways, but mostly offputting and intrusive. But, even as our church is talking more about witnessing to our faith (an endeavor I support, though with some discomfort in the execution), I find the idea of doing anything specifically designed to convert others, living or dead, disturbing.

This rather glib false binary misses my point: by promising to end this practice, and then carrying on with it, the LDS Church is disrespecting not the dead, but the living people to whom those promises were made. And there are of course other issues here besides body and soul: integrity, moral high ground, respect, civility, tolerance. These are all legitimate grounds for criticizing the church’s practices whatever your own beliefs about baptism. And none of these issues are abstract or hypothetical for those of us living inside the Zion Curtain; many (not all!) Mormons show the same arrogance and disrespect toward the living who don’t share their faith that they do toward the dead…

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/53618070-78/church-baptized-jewish-pearl.html.csp

I find the LDS church posthumous baptism of Pearl abominable (yes, less abominable than the murder in itself, but what the LDS church did still makes me want to puke).

Second, the LDS church has repeatedly promised not to perform post-mortem baptism on people of the Jewish faith. They have repeatedly broken that promise. That, alone, is offensive.

I agree that having asked the LDS to stop the baptisms, the baptisms should have stopped. But by my lights, offenses against souls are much lesser than injustices against living bodies.

But obviously some people are offended by the practice of baptizing dead souls. What’s truly aggravating about the whole thing is that the LDS Church authorities have promised repeatedly and emphatically to Jewish leaders that they would stop baptizing the souls of people who died in the Shoah. And it keeps happening. It’s indicative of the institution’s arrogance, and its lack of trustworthiness and credibility on pretty much any issue.

On a related topic, have you heard about the prominent BYU professor who this week offered a rationale for the historical ban on blacks holding the LDS priesthood?

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/53618613-78/church-priesthood-lds-mormon.html.csp

While we’re clarifying misconceptions, I wonder how many people in the media who talk about the lifting of the ban in 1978 understand what “priesthood” means in the LDS context. The ban didn’t mean that blacks couldn’t become priests like in the Catholic Church; it meant that black men weren’t considered adult members of the church (Mormon boys routinely receive the priesthood at age 12).